A Callahan Christmas Miracle

The mustang had come from someone who knew the old ways, and who understood the Diablos.

There was only one person he could think of who knew such things: his father, Carlos.

Somehow, Wolf had gotten hold of it, which meant he was getting closer. Galen decided he would wait until morning to discuss the situation with Grandfather, and then proceed with a family meeting. Matters were turning urgent.

An almost silent tap on his door interrupted his raging thoughts. “Yes?”

The door opened. “Galen?” Rose said. “Can I come in?”

“Sure.” He sat up, turned on the lamp on his bedside table. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” She sat on the foot of his bed, wrapped in a plaid red-and-green robe that didn’t match the smiley-face pajamas she’d put back on. She wore some kind of fuzzy boots that looked comfortable and warm, and her blond hair had been washed clean of dirt and cobwebs, hanging in damp strands around her scrubbed, makeup-free face.

He thought she was cute as a baby deer.

“I forgot to tell you something else I saw in the cave.”

“What?”

“Besides the weapons,” Rose said, “there was also a front loader. I didn’t take a photo, because it was at the back.” Her blue eyes focused directly on him, waiting for him to draw the same conclusion she had.

“A front loader.”

She nodded.

Galen leaned back against the wall, his arms crossed over his bare chest. “There’s no way they got a big piece of machinery down the crevice, and filled the spot back in. The ground we were lying on was solid.”

“Exactly.”

Suddenly, Wolf’s desire to keep them off the new property became clear—and Storm’s wish to sell them the land because “things were happening there he wasn’t comfortable with” made more sense.

“They’ve dug a damn tunnel,” Galen said. “They’re burrowing under Rancho Diablo and the land across the canyons.”

“Could come from as far away as Mexico,” Rose agreed. “I think that cave is just a storeroom, an adjunct off the main tunnel. Maybe I went down some kind of air vent, or a fissure that’s recently cracked open, which they haven’t discovered. Had you ever noticed it before?”

Galen hadn’t, and right now it was hard to think with Rose sitting on his bed, a vision of temptation. What he wanted to do was grab her and kiss her, maybe even find out what was under those happy-face pajamas. But one didn’t seduce an employee, no matter how sexy she was.

His brothers had seduced employees and made them wives.

Not me. I’m going to leave well enough alone. We shouldn’t even have sent her down an air vent or shaft or whatever the hell that stupid hole was. What was I thinking?

He’d been thinking that he wanted any excuse at all to see her, and hadn’t dreamed she’d accept this mission and throw herself into it with more gusto than any Callahan.

“We haven’t had a whole lot of chances to check out that land. First of all, it’s huge, so there’s a lot to cover. We don’t have the manpower to do it, especially when we’d be trespassing.” Galen rubbed his shoulder absently. “But Xav Phillips was over there poking around one day—he’s one of our foremen—and he noticed something funny about the ground in that area.”

“We should go back and check it out more thoroughly, maybe in daylight.”

He looked at her, stunned. “You sound way too much like my sister. Don’t even think about going back there without me.”

Rose smiled, and his slow-working brain went blank as he stared at her mouth. Those lips were just made for him to kiss. He could feel it, the call of the wild screaming through his blood.

“I won’t,” she said, and he snapped back to the present.

“I’ll fire you if you do, on the spot, no questions asked,” he warned, suddenly afraid that Rose was indeed just like his sister, with an impetuous, adventuresome nature that bordered on wildness.

Or bravery. The military would call it bravery.

His sister was too brave for her own good. And this spunky woman on the end of his bed was beginning to sound very much the same.

“I promise,” Rose said. “It wouldn’t be any fun without you, anyway.”

“I wouldn’t call what we did tonight fun.”

She smiled again. “It was a lot of fun.”

“You realize we were within a rabbit’s foot of getting shot at.”

“You had us covered. I trust your marksmanship.”

Galen closed his eyes for just a moment, opening them to stare at her. In the photo she’d snapped of the weapons cache, there’d been a few AK-47s, and a few more exotic styles of weaponry. Someone was gearing up for battle, and he wondered if Rose recognized just how little protection his rifle would have been against, say, a clip with multiple rounds in it. “While my marksmanship is decent, we didn’t want to get caught.”

“That’s true.” Rose stood, her look teasing. “Still, it was something to tell the grandkids, wasn’t it?”

He shook his head. “God, no. Monkey hear, monkey do. Didn’t you ever tell your parents, ‘Well, you did it, why can’t I?’ As far as the kids are concerned, one should never admit to anything more than sitting in church seven days a week. At least that’s my plan.”

Rose laughed. “Not a very believable one, but whatever. When you have kids, you can revise your strategy.” She went to the door. “Good night, Galen.”

He watched her disappear into the hallway. When the door closed, he turned off the lamp and tried to settle back into a relaxed state conducive to sleeping.

It wasn’t going to work. Between the tale of the tunnel under Rancho Diablo, and the sweet woman he knew was sleeping just down the hall, Galen wasn’t certain he would ever relax again.

His phone buzzed with an incoming text. He glanced at it, his gaze widening with each word.

You know a tunnel under Rancho Diablo means this ranch is sitting on Dante’s Inferno? And maybe the nine circles of Hell? You should let me go down there again to find the entrance. I just need a little more time and equipment. If there’s a tunnel, it’s reinforced, so it would be a great find to turn over to the local authorities.

Galen’s blood chilled. Rose would do it. She wouldn’t think anything about turning over information about what she’d found to the sheriff, or probably even to the government. He thought he remembered hearing that her father had been in the military in a secret division, and then was a Texas Ranger before being voted Tempest’s sheriff many years ago.

Mr. Carstairs had spawned a fighter.

Nothing good could come of such a darling girl with the genes of a warrior sitting in her bed, pondering the next phase of an adventure she was itching to ignite.

Then again, there was no reason the two of them couldn’t ignite things together. Why start a fire by yourself when you could invite a friend to create mayhem with you?

Galen jumped out of bed, tossed on a T-shirt and jeans and headed down the hall.

Chapter Four

Rose raised a brow as Galen tore through her bedroom door. “Well, hello. Come to tell me what a great idea I had?”